Sexual Politics in The Witcher 2

So I’m planning to keep on writing about The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings for two reasons. First, I question the productivity of having all writers everywhere write about a single game/book/movie for a few weeks before quickly and permanently moving on to something newer. Second, I’m a freelancer, and I don’t get review copies all that often. So when I do get one, I show my appreciation by being thorough both in my experience with the work and in my analysis of it.

So with that in mind, let’s talk about just how questionable the game’s sexual politics get toward the end there.

There are male mages in The Witcher 2, but all of them are minor villains—sexless area bosses who serve mostly to add some fireballs and such to important battles. Female magic-users are a different matter, uniformly attractive and, almost without exception, sexually available to Geralt.

When I say that they are uniformly attractive, by the way, I mean it: many of their animations, both for spell-casting and for flirtation or sex, are identical.

Come to think of it, most women in The Witcher 2 are uniform in that way, drawing from a handful of body-types and a somewhat shallow pool of movements. One sex scene late in the game (the one with that sexy spy sort of a sorceress) is little more than a palette swap of an earlier encounter with a recently rescued she-elf. The only action unique to the late-game sequence involves said sorceress slapping Geralt on the ass before diving into bed with him. Which marks her as—empowered?

In any case, the universal hotness and promiscuity of sorceresses seems innocuous enough—even if somewhat at odds with the “mature” or “grown-up” intent of the Witcher series—and certainly an improvement over the prudish, game-long courtships typical of Bioware fare.

That is, until the third act. Oh my, the third act. Men and women both get killed, but undeniably, the women fare far worse. Sorceresses are pretty much exclusively the ones to be shackled and imprisoned, beaten and tortured, and on and on and on. One unfortunate character (the only authoritative and socially ascendant lesbian in the game, incidentally) gets blinded with a spoon.

In a game replete with choices and divergent paths, that rather grisly spoon-blinding business is inexplicably mandatory. And for God’s sake, it happens while Geralt is standing there watching. Geralt, whom the game has taken such lengths to establish as a man allergic to injustice—and who refuses to kill a war criminal literally seconds later—does not give the player the option to intervene and stop a then-defenseless sorceress from having her eyes gouged out. That’s bizarre, not to mention wildly incongruous.

My sneaking suspicion is that CD Projekt RED simply wanted to heighten the stakes of the plot and the grittiness of the world as the game drew to a close, and that the above was simply the most direct route to that destination. But that idea is more than a little upsetting. As Film Crit Hulk pointed out in the context of Arkham City, misogyny and violence against women are all-too-common go-tos for readymade videogame grit.

But whatever their reason, the game’s last few sections contain a hugely disproportionate amount of horrific and not-quite-necessary violence inflicted on attractive and partially interchangeable women. That’s a shame in a game that can and often does do considerably better.

The Factual Age

John Sharp says that we’re leaving behind a “visual age,” shifting from a culture of aesthetics to a culture of play, interaction, and discursive collaboration.

In his On The Media appearance (and in the book he was there to plug), David Weinberger points toward another, equally important historical shift: we’re moving from a culture of indisputable facts and “stopping points” (the culture of books) to one that “includes difference and disagreement as a part of knowledge itself.”

With the Internet, Weinberger argues, “we finally have a medium that is big enough for knowledge,” allowing us to worry less about the place of things in “the order of the universe” and more about the act of constantly, incrementally contributing to collective human understanding. Knowledge has moved from something fixed and immutable to something that necessarily, constantly, and explicitly contradicts itself, “a huge mass of contradictory connections that you travel along forever.”

This new epoch has its drawbacks: nowadays, “facts are not going to settle the issues we want them to settle. There is no conceivable additional evidence to convince Americans that our president was not born in Kenya, yet a sizable percentage of Americans continue to believe that. Facts are not going to settle our disputes.”

But then, the factual age had its share of epistemological bugaboos, too: because the platypus fit so poorly into contemporary taxonomy, it was entirely possible to look at a platypus right in front of one’s own face and say “This cannot be!”

Do give the piece a listen if the above sounds interesting.

Where’s Evil?

This is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war. This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country—the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age? There is no one else to go after other than the United States and that has been the case now for almost two hundred years, once America’s preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.

He didn’t have much success in the early days. Our foundation was very strong, in fact, is very strong. But over time, that great, acidic quality of time corrodes even the strongest foundations. And Satan has done so by attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition.

-Rick Santorum

 

“I’m not your destiny, or the Devil, either!” I said. “Look at you! Came to kill evil with your bare hands, and now away you go with no more glory than a man sideswiped by a Greyhound bus! And that’s all the glory you deserve!” I said. “That’s all that any man at war with pure evil deserves.

“There are plenty of good reasons for fighting,” I said, “but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.

“It’s that part of an imbecile, ” I said, “that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.”

-Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

Intellectual Property Thought Experiment #1

Tim has been out of school for several several years. When Tim was in school, he hated the high prices of textbooks. So Tim decides that he wants to hurt the textbook industry, and he decides to do so by pirating as many textbooks as he can find.

Tim goes to a BitTorrent tracker, and he downloads 10,000 textbooks. Neither the authors nor the publishers get a cent of Tim’s money, and now Tim has an extensive, interdisciplinary library at his disposal.

But Tim has the sinking feeling that he hasn’t struck much of a blow against the textbook industry.

As we’ve said, Tim isn’t in school anymore, so there’s a fairly slim chance that he would have bought many (if any) of these books. And if Tim does go back to school, he just might get charged for books upfront, regardless of whether he already has the texts he needs. And by the time Tim does go back to school, if Tim does indeed end up going back to school, there will very likely be new editions of the books he needs, and his professors will very likely require those new editions, which may or may not be available to pirate.

So in other words, what Tim has done is acquire for free a bunch of things that he would probably never have paid for, and that he just might end up purchasing anyway, in the end. In short, Tim has failed completely in his attempt to hurt the textbook industry.

Tim has succeeded, however, in disproving the ridiculous notion that an instance of piracy necessarily represents a lost sale. Is there any rational way to argue that, by pirating 10,000 textbooks, Tim has cost someone 10,000 sales? or 5,000? or 1,000? or 10?

Without ignoring the ethical dimension of piracy, we can recognize that what Tim has done here is quite different from, say, stealing crates of textbooks and then hoarding or reselling them. We can recognize the significant differences between piracy and theft, and further, we can recognize that having one’s work pirated 10,000 times does not mean that one has lost 10,000 sales, or even 10,000 potential sales.

Next time, I’ll go into more detail about that last point.

Selling Art by Marketing “Art”

This is the fifth post in a series on the limits of art as a term.
Parts One and Two and Three and Four might help new readers, context-wise.

This past year, I’ve been working to establish a small business called Gray Blush Gallery. I’ve tried to mention the project on this blog from time to time without just coming right out and saying buy art buy art online buy original art online buy original art online and do it right now because the original art that you can buy online at Gray Blush Gallery is really quite good and you will rather like it.

Restraint has not always come easily.

Gray Blush Gallery is a place to buy gallery art online, but we usually refer to it simply as a place to buy art online, and I’d like to talk a bit about why that is.

Our advertising and traffic data is (1) necessarily somewhat private, (2) probably boring to most people who are not us, and (3) still inconclusive. But I’ll say this: people don’t usually find us by searching for paintings (even though we have a lot of paintings), or by searching for an art gallery (even though we most certainly are an art gallery, albeit a gallery of ones and zeroes rather than bricks and mortar). And certainly, no one is searching for gallery art, since that’s a term I more or less made up.

The data suggests that people who are looking for an art gallery don’t expect to be able to buy anything. They anticipate a one-way communication in which the gallery presents stuff for them to look at and appreciate, and then they look at it and appreciate it, and that’s that.

Likewise with paintings. Your average Google-user doesn’t seem to be searching for paintings in order to buy them.

When people want to find the sort of stuff that Gray Blush sells—unique art-objects in traditional gallery media—they seem to search simply for art. This means that Gray Blush Gallery gets stuck in among art galleries that don’t sell the work they display, abstract academic discussions about art as a concept, and the sorts of mass-produced art prints in which Art.com tends to traffic.

Now, I’m not badmouthing any of those three groups. I love museums, I’m (obviously) interested in discussing art, and I have no issue with mass-produced art-objects of any kind.

What is sort of an issue, for me personally and presumably for others with similar business models, is that there is no word in contemporary English that clearly indicates the difference between a Starry Night poster in editions of ten-million and the original Starry Night, of which there is only one. We can agree that there’s a difference—and indeed, some will say with great vitriol that the former is not art—but how does one explain that difference to another person, let alone to a search engine?

Words like original and unique do describe the difference, but they can easily be misconstrued as value judgments. A print of Salvador Dali’s work could reasonably be described as unique in its style and original in its aesthetic intent, at least when viewed in its proper historical context.

And besides, lots of contemporary artists are creating original art that is meant from the first to be mass-produced. So neither original nor contemporary will do the trick.

No, as I’ve said, when we want to describe unique art-objects in traditional media, we generally just call them art. Which would be fine, if not for the unruly gelatinous mass of alternative definitions that burdens the term at all times.

By calling gallery art art, we grant gallery spaces and traditional media a mystical, totemic power. We keep them those media and institutions at a distance. We make them remote at best, and frightening at worst.

And if we use a more precise or less intimidating term than art, then ironically, what we’re saying immediately becomes less clear to most readers, listeners, and potential art-buyers. We’re compelled to rely on a word that is vague and spookily unfixed.

So the solution is not merely to start using a different word (which would only confuse matters). The solution, rather, is to demystify gallery art—which is easier said than done, of course. But hey, we’ve worked hard to make Gray Blush Gallery inviting, accessible, and substantive. So that’s a start.

And understanding the history of the word art, and its quagmire of contradictory definitions, and its shaky utility in the marketplace—I would like to think that understanding all of that is a pretty good start, too.

We’re Not Objective

If you’re not sure what The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear was about, this is what it was about:

No, not the bit about turtles--though for the record, I agree.

There seems to have been some confusion as to whether Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and the rest of the Daily Show folks are subtly saying that we should all vote Democrat, or very clearly saying exactly what the fuck they’re saying–namely, that our country is not on the brink of devolving into a socialist/fascist/communist/theocratic dystopia, and that our news media spend about 99% of their time callously exploiting (and creating) people’s fears, rather than trying to keep the political process honest. That’s not a partisan position. It’s just reasonable.

Which is not to say that Jon Stewart has no political ideology. Everyone has opinions, and everyone is biased. If our news organizations would stop worrying about appearing objective, and instead use that energy to be intelligent and accurate, then perhaps they could do some worthwhile work.

Look at it this way: If NPR really were an objective news organization–and they clearly think that they are, since they banned their employees from attending the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, lest they should appear biased–then Juan Williams’ opinions about Muslims (or anything else) would not be grounds for termination. As long as Williams did his job well–as long as he did objective reporting–his opinions would not matter in the least, right? Or are we are arguing that a good journalist must have no personal biases? Because in that case, there has never been, nor will there ever be, such a thing as a good journalist.

The whole idea of objective reporting is misleading. Having an opinion is not bad reporting. Having an unsupported opinion is bad reporting, just as unsupported facts are not factual. We have replaced the burden of proof (which supports honest argument) with a pretense to objectivity (which fosters dishonesty, demagoguery, and equivocation).

Hence all this idiotic hang-wringing about Jon Stewart’s ideological position. NPR asks, “Is it a political rally? Is it comedy?” It’s both. That’s how satire works. Case closed.

To ask whether the rally supports or opposes Obama–or the Tea Party, or Glenn Beck, or whoever one thinks it supports or opposes–is to miss the point entirely. The rally did not espouse a party affiliation, nor did it aspire to milquetoast opinionlessness. The point was specifically to show that an awful lot of people would like to be addressed as rational adults rather than frightened, malleable, exceptionally stupid children.

When most of the people with platforms purport to have no opinions, only the most extreme and incendiary caricatures of political thought (the very loudest opinions) get any airtime. When everyone is allowed to have an opinion, but is also required to support it, then we can have a variety of viewpoints and a substantive debate between them.

Jon Stewart isn’t trying to tell you how to vote tomorrow. He’s just reminding you that, when voters can recognize bullshit, Democracy is much healthier. So here’s my small contribution to that noble goal: Whenever a news organization claims to be objective, that news organization is lying to you, or else to themselves. Yes, any news organization. Yes, that includes the one that you personally like and/or with whom you personally agree. It can be surprisingly hard to inform oneself, but we can start by contumaciously ignoring sources of deliberate misinformation and self-congratulatory, intellectually dishonest pseudo-objectivity.

Your Opponent Is Not Your Enemy

Bill Maher frustrates the hell out of me. He’s clearly smart, he’s often funny, and his show allows other smart and/or funny people the opportunity to have lengthy discussions about important things. But he’s also infinitely smug, and Real Time–when it isn’t hosting some of the best political discussions on television–takes far too many detours into lazy, self-satisfied, Jay Leno-style late night pablum. That kind of bad writing reduces the overall quality of the show considerably, but it doesn’t necessarily contradict or weaken the substantive discussion for which I tune in.

This kind of crap does, though: “When it comes to voting,” Maher said on October 1, “you’ve got to grow up and realize that there’s a difference between a disappointing friend and a deadly enemy.” In this analogy, Democrats are the “disappointing friend,” and Republicans are the “deadly enemy.”

Maher’s statement struck me as inflammatory partisan bullshit, probably because it is, in fact, inflammatory partisan bullshit. But to be fair, I heard Bill Maher say that only a few hours after hearing Jon Stewart say that we really, really need be wary of precisely that sort of idiocy.

There’s a difference between disagreeing with people–like newscasters on Fox News that I think are incorrect in their analysis of the day’s events–and people that threaten to kill you for putting a cartoon image of Mohammad in a bear suit. And that’s a line that we too often forget.

Our system genuinely allows for peaceable exchanges of power, Stewart reminds us on NPR’s Fresh Air. Even if [INSERT POLITICIAN YOU REALLY DON'T LIKE] comes to power,

we’ll be fine. You know, we had a Civil War. Just–we’re not that fragile. And I think we always have to remember that people can be opponents, but not enemies. And there are enemies in the world. We just need the news media to help us delineate, and I think that’s where the failing is: That the culture of corruption that exists in the media doesn’t allow us to delineate between enemies and opponents, and that’s where we sort of fall into trouble.

Or to put it as succinctly as possible: Al-Qaeda is my enemy, and Glenn Beck is my opponent, and seriously, there’s a difference.

And it’s a very real difference, and obscuring it is an historically situated political strategy that, according to Rick Perlstein, Richard Nixon helped to pioneer between 1966 and 1972. It is not an inevitable consequence of human nature, or of the political process, but rather a matter of “using the angers, anxieties, and resentments” of the day to unite voters against a common, essentially imagined enemy.

When Republicans suffered humiliating defeats in 1970, Nixon blamed the chicanery of his enemies: America’s enemies, as he had come to think of them. He grew yet more determined to destroy them, because of what he was convinced was their determination to destroy him.

Millions of Americans recognized the balance of forces in the exact same way–that America was engulfed in a pitched battle between the forces of darkness and the forces of light. The only thing was: Americans disagreed radically over which side was which.

Rick Perlstein, Nixonland (Scribner, 2009): xii.

The imagined conflict between the forces of light and those of darkness (with light defined as whatever I think, and darkness defined as whatever I don’t) has come to dominate the American political landscape, to the extreme detriment of the nation’s public discourse. We actually forget that someone who wants to kill us belongs to a different category than someone with whom we disagree about the role of government in regulating commerce.

And I get it: A world composed entirely of absolutes would be much easier to sort out than our own messy, complicated one. But we have a responsibility to live in the real world, because we’re adults, and growing up isn’t about realizing “that there’s a difference between a disappointing friend and a deadly enemy,” as Bill Maher said the other night. Growing up is about realizing that the person with whom you disagree is not necessarily an enemy, let alone a deadly one.

There really are deadly enemies in the world, and we’ll be in no position to confront them if we waste all of our time and energy squabbling with one another along cynically delineated partisan lines.

Do You Support the Homosexual Agenda, Whatever the Fuck That Is?

A few weeks ago, I received a mass email from Eugene Delgaudio, who is apparently the president of some very important organization or something. “Dear fellow American,” Delgaudio began,

The Radical Homosexuals claim you and other pro-family Americans actually now support same-sex marriage, special job preferences for homosexuals and promotion of the homosexual lifestyle in schools.

Is it true? What do you say?

As one might guess, these lines serve as a the preamble to a tirade against Radical Homosexuals, The Homosexual Lobby, and Leftist Thought Control. And as one might also guess, all of these frightening terms go tantalizingly undefined throughout the proceedings, as does their comforting, besieged antithesis, Pro-Family values.

Putting aside that spooky, enigmatic language, the argument at hand seems to be that an organized cadre of gay people, relying on the indulgence of an increasingly secular United States, wants to (1) create anti-discrimination laws (possibly modeled after Affirmative Action) for gay employees and job applicants, (2) secure marriage and adoption rights for gay couples nationwide, and (3) include gay sex in public schools’ sexual education programs. As one might assume, these nefarious goals threaten to undermine Pro-Family values, or something.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I disagree strongly with the idea that gay marriage somehow undermines traditional marriage, or that gay adoption is somehow bad for children. There is very little reliable, empirical evidence to suggest (much less prove) the innate superiority of heterosexual coupling when it comes to raising children, and there is in fact some recent and well-publicized evidence to the contrary.

Further, the whole idea of “teaching gay sex” is a bit confusing. We can reasonably and usefully say that vaginal intercourse (of the sort that involves a penis rather than a sex toy) is a straight sex-act, insofar as gay couples are physically incapable of performing it. There are, however, no gay sex-acts–no sex-acts that only gay couples can perform, or that are intrinsically different when performed by gay couples (or by dozens of people at once, for that matter). There is no significant physiological difference, for example, between a man performing oral sex on a man, and a woman performing oral sex on a man. If children and adolescents are to understand the mechanics of sex, then they will inevitably have to understand that, with one notable exception, no sex-act is inherently any gayer than any other.

And as for affirmative action, I would argue that discriminatory hiring practices are bad, and that frivolous lawsuits are also bad, and that we need to work to eliminate both. None of which has the slightest thing to do with family values, sexual orientation, or political affiliation.

All of that being said, I’m not going to brush off the so-called Pro-Family values argument just because it feels a tad antique and silly. Immediately dismissing something because it’s traditional is exactly as absurd as immediately accepting something because it’s traditional. I’m not interested in doing away with the wisdom of previous generations, any more than I’m interested in assuming that everything previous generations thought or did was wise. (The Sermon on the Mount? Exceptionally wise. The Children’s Crusade? Surreally unwise).

So, what is the actual argument against gay marriage, and so on?

I’m sure you’ve been wondering just what the American Morality Survey contains. In short, the American Morality Survey is a perfect example of why polls are, generally speaking, bullshit–and further, of how concepts like family and morality can become buzz-words, devoid of descriptive and ethical content. It is a Rosetta Stone of disingenuous, fear-mongering misinformation. It is an immensely instructive object lesson in the mass production of useless data, and wherever one stands on the issue of gay rights, one has a vested interest in recognizing this sort of demagoguery when one sees it.

Here are the poll’s five questions, with some comments on each. Keep in mind that, on the survey form, “No” is selected by default for each of these.

1. Should homosexuals receive special job rights and force businesses, schools, churches and even daycares to hire and advance homosexuals or face prosecution and multimillion-dollar lawsuits?

As I have said earlier, the goal of Affirmative Action is to eliminate discrimination, not to promote it. If the latter happens, then the specific policy in question has failed, but that does not invalidate the idea itself. In its strange phrasing, this question disavows the fact that straight people currently receive “special job rights,” in the same way that so many arguments against Affirmative Action disavow white male privilege.

2. Do you support the use of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to fund homosexual “art”, so called AIDS-awareness programs and homosexual research grants that are frequently funneled to political advocacy?

Buried deep in that diatribe is the kernel of a half-decent point: Some AIDS charities do still frame AIDS as a gay disease, and that is a grave mistake. But if the government is going to fund any art (a separate issue), then it is more or less inevitable that some of the artists will be gay, and that some of the art will be activist in nature. And as for research grants being used to advocate a particular political ideology, that problem is hardly limited to any one branch of research, or to any one political project. Any research grant that says “Prove that heterosexual marriage is the best thing for children,” or “prove that heterosexual marriage is not the best thing for children,” rather than “let’s figure out the actual effect of heterosexual marriage on children” is bad research, plain and simple.

3. Should homosexuality be promoted in school as a healthy lifestyle choice, while information about the life threatening consequences are ignored?

Are there really sex education course that do not mention sexually transmitted infections? And for that matter, are there sexually transmitted infections that are transmitted through homosexual sex-acts, but not through heterosexual sex-acts? And for that matter, is there even such a thing as a homosexual sex-act?

4. Do you support same-sex “marriage” for homosexuals or “marriage-like” rights, like homosexuals being able to adopt children and raise them in their “lifestyle”?

The main issue here is the “condescending tone” and “seething, prejudicial contempt” implied by the “frivolous quotation marks.” No one is actually being quoted here, you’ll note.

5. Should the U.S. Supreme Court overturn traditional marriage between one man and one woman?

Again, this language is biased in the extreme: We’re overturning traditional marriage, not granting equal rights. And since the Supreme Court has never ruled on this issue, to grant queer Americans the right to marry would not be to “overturn” anything, legally speaking.

So, fellow American, my answer to all of these questions is: That’s a really stupid question, designed to flatter me if I agree with the person who wrote the question, and trap me into a compromising position if I do not. Which is really the answer to almost every question in almost every poll, if we’re being honest.

Strength in Numbers

In the most recent episode of The Simpsons, Bart had something topical to write on the blackboard: “South Park–We’d stand beside you if we weren’t so scared.”

Even for The Simpsons (a show that hasn’t contained a valid satirical thought in years) that gesture is unbelievably stupid, morally bankrupt, and utterly hypocritical in the truest sense of the word. The principle, which Bill O’Reilly shares, is basically this: Free speech is extremely important, except when someone makes a threat, in which case we should do whatever the terrorist says, regardless of our values.

As Matt Stone explains, this has become “the new normal” in the wake of the Danish cartoon controversy in 2005.

If everyone would have just–like normally they do in the news organizations–just printed the cartoons, everyone would have rallied together. Now that guy [the cartoonist] has to be in hiding and all this shit, because everyone just hung him out to dry.

The only reason that South Park’s creators have to be scared–the only reason that Theo Van Gogh was targeted, the only reason that Ayaan Hursi Ali needs protection–is that no one else is standing up. When a few people are singled out, there is the potential for violence. If everyone would show a little backbone, then no one could be targeted. Ali recently said as much to Anderson Cooper, and this same idea is at work in Dan Savage’s recently-announced “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day.”

In that same Anderson Cooper piece, Revolution Muslim’s Younus Abdullah Mohammed says that his group is “commanded to terrorize the disbelievers… I define terrorism as making them fearful, so that they think twice before they go rape your mother, or kill your brother, or go onto your land and try to steal your resources.” To the best of my knowledge, Mohammed’s mother is quite safe, so I assume that he is referring to the United States’ military presence in Muslim countries. Well, this business with depictions of Muhammad isn’t likely to end the American wars of occupation in the Middle East, so in that sense, Mohammed’s tactics have been a miserable failure.

But Revolution Muslim has apparently succeeded in making people fearful, and in that sense their terrorist threats have been a rousing success. There is one law of Sharia that American non-Muslims now follow, zealously, out of pure cowardice. Bill O’Reilly, and the team behind that moment on The Simpsons, and everyone else refusing to speak out, is making terrorism work. What an excellent use of their media presences.

If you don’t want to live in a world in which your values (whatever they might be) are only one threat away from being abandoned, then now is the time to take a stand.

The Fundamentalist’s Paradox

Recently, I posted a three-part entry. My goal was to take a look at what Revolution Muslim, the group that warned Matt Stone and Trey Parker not to show an image of the Prophet Muhammad on South Park (and implied that the duo would almost certainly be murdered if they did not heed the “warning”), had actually said. I thought that it was important not to immediately dismiss the website as being too “radical” to hold a valid opinion–to meet it on its own terms and engage in the kind of open discussion that at least one of its bloggers claims to want. I want to approach everyone, and especially those with whom I strongly disagree, on terms of mutual respect and shared humanity.

But man-oh-man, does Revolution Muslim ever make that difficult.

Revolution Muslim is down at the moment, because of hacking or heavy traffic or both, so I am unable to look up the name of the blogger to whom I was responding. But at least one person at that website, Younus Abdullah Mohammed, is a massive hypocrite, and his hypocrisy has given me the opportunity to bump up against the outermost limits of my own patience and tolerance.

In a recent Gawker interview, Mohammed said that “We already know the outcome as Muslims… Islam will take over the world,” and will triumph over “the filth and trash that is America.” He said that most Americans are “dumbed down, stupid and pathetic.” He said that “it’s very justifiable to act violently against Western aggression,” and that “we did not start the war on September the 11th 2001. You started the war.”

Since that “we” is ambiguous–does he mean Muslims generally, or just the ones who commit acts of terrorism?–I am not in a position to answer that particular claim. But I am in a position to point out that Revolution Muslim is based in New York City. As Jon Stewart observes, Revolution Muslim can only say all of this “because of how much we, in this country, value and protect even their freedom of expression.”

And indeed, I value Younus Abdullah Mohammed’s freedom of expression very highly, even when he spouts hateful, perplexing gibberish about “Darwinist faggots who are as despicable as the rest, walking around eating your Triscuits.” (I’m pretty sure that evolution happened and is happening in some form or another, and I do enjoy Triscuits, so I guess that I am just such a “faggot.” I’ve been called worse). Younus Abdullah Mohammed is absolutely allowed his homophobia, his implied disbelief in evolution, and even his ill-defined hatred of this nation’s beloved snack crackers.

But if Islam were to “take over the world,” do you think that analogous dissent would be allowed? Do you think that I could have publicly called the Taliban “trash” as a citizen of Afghanistan, circa 2001, without being imprisoned or killed?

The central irony of Revolution Muslim is that it could only exist in the kind of society that it actively seeks to undermine and overthrow. Free speech allows for tirades against free speech, but theocracy does not allow for tirades against (or even minor disagreements with) theocracy. Speaking out against free speech is something of a self-negating principle.

Incidentally, in the Gawker article that I quoted above, you will find a reproduction of the 2005 cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb on his head. Have a look, and downland it and archive it, because its availability is unreliable; due to the spectacular cowardice of the Western media in general, lots of people have yet to see the image at all, and it’s worth knowing what all the fuss was about. I can certainly see why the image was and is considered offensive, but that’s all the more reason to see it for yourself and form your own opinion.